1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, a computer-readable recording medium storing a program, and an image processing method.
2. Description of Related Art
In recent years, there has been created a multi-core processor which is configured to include a plurality of operation sections (hereinafter referred to as cores) such as processor cores being accumulated in one package, and which performs parallel processing by dispersing processing to the respective cores so as to improve its processing performance.
With regard to an image forming apparatus such as a printer, a copier, a facsimile machine, and a multifunction peripheral including these machines, it has been proposed to achieve speed-up of printing processing by executing the parallel processing with the multi-core processor.
For executing printing processing in such image forming apparatus using the multi-core processor, there has been known a technique to perform compression processing and/or expansion processing in parallel by dividing image data of one page into a plurality of bands and assigning the cores to the bands respectively.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2005-108114 discloses a technique to perform compression/expansion processing in parallel by dividing each of at least one scanning line, which constitutes a bit-mapped image, into a plurality of partial regions, and assigning at least one of a plurality of processors to each of the partial regions.
Furthermore, there has been an idea to perform rasterization processing in parallel by converting page description language (PDL) format data into intermediate language (display list (DL)) format data being divided into a plurality of bands, and assigning each band of the DL data to each of the cores, in order to improve efficiency of bitmap data generation processing.
However, when performing the abovementioned rasterization processing, each band requires a work region having a capacity depending on the number of lines constituting the band. Thus, when assigning the bands to the cores respectively and performing rasterization processing simultaneously or in parallel, the work regions each having a capacity corresponding to the number of bands, which are processed simultaneously or in parallel, need to be ensured. Accordingly, the more the number of cores, the larger the work regions, and a problem of increase of a memory capacity to be used as the work regions arises.